Stories

JetBrains RubyMine is an IDE for productive Ruby and Rails development. It offers an intelligent editor with smart code completion and refactoring tools, an integrated graphical debugger, a version control integration, and outstanding web development facilities. On top of that, the recent 2.0 release brings new refactorings, improved Cucumber integration and Shoulda support, Ruby 1.9, and Rails i18n assistance. Try RubyMine at jetbrains.com and use the "Ruby5" coupon code to get $10 off.

Following the update to Google Chrome last Wednesday, which added support for Web Sockets, Lakshan Perera released Web Socket Server based on EventMachine last Friday. It's a simple echo-server implementation, but certainly demonstrates how it can be done and allows you to extend it to fit your needs.

Nanotest, by Martin Aumont, is a new minimalist testing framework. It implements only the basics: assert, pass, fail. That's about it. So, if you've got a small Ruby project and want a lightweight testing framework, or maybe you're looking to build your own framework and want somewhere to start, check it out.

Redis keeps popping up around here, and Ohm by Michel Martens is the latest library to utilize it. Ohm is an object-hash mapping that does more than just act like a more robust memcached store. Ohm provides you with Ohm::Models that you can use in your Ruby application which define attributes, validations, finders, and more. But, because Redis is the back-end, you don't need to define a schema or generate migrations.

Rconfig is a library for Ruby which purports to be "the complete solution for configuration management" in your application. Written by Rahmal Conda, it supports multiple configuration files, in XML, YAML, and properties files. It provides with a Hash or dot-style interface and even supports multiple environments and host-specific configurations.

Written by Joe Damato, Jake Douglas, and Aman Gupta, memprof is a new Ruby memory profiler. What makes this different from bleak_house, though, is that you don't need to run a modified Ruby VM. With simple calls, you can have it display statistics of objects cleaned and objects still in memory to track down if or when your application may be bloating.

Last week, Thoughtbot put up a Ruby Community Survey. It's a couple dozen questions asking how you indent your code, where you throw your "private" and "protected" keywords, how you use parenthesis, and more. Take a few minutes to go submit your own answers and when the results are posted, we'll get a good cross-section of the thoughts and practices of current Ruby practitioners.

Tile, Rango, and Flotomatic are all covered in today's episode. We also have some version string tools and a recap of RubyConf. Then we rock out to a song about the mountain of woes that is developing for IE.